Jeffrey D. Sadow is an associate professor of political science at Louisiana State University Shreveport. If you're an elected official, political operative or anyone else upset at his views, don't go bothering LSUS or LSU System officials about that because these are his own views solely.
This publishes Sunday through Thursday with the exception of 7 holidays. Also check out his Louisiana Legislature Log especially during legislative sessions (in "Louisiana Politics Blog Roll" below).

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21.7.13

LA Democrats still in denial as switching continues

There is a reason Louisiana Democrats from Sen. Mary Landrieu on down seem
determined to ensconce themselves as a permanent minority: their flight from
reality born of self-denial anchored in faith in liberalism.

Yet again, in the wake of more recent switches of former Democrat
elected officials – three at the state level, another at the local – to the
GOP, others
of the party have been left to muse about why the stream flows steadily
away from them, carrying support, politicians and, most importantly, power. And,
it seems, nothing changes as they continue
to fail to understand at the most basic level what is happening to them.

As noted
previously, a combination of societal and political changes have reset the
parameters of political contests in Louisiana. Given the heavy infection of
populism in the state’s political culture, for decades primarily a
personalistic style that attempted to wed voters as dependents to politicians
on the basis of charisma and resource distribution from them carried the day.
But with more access to education and information to the mass public, in the
past two decades these bonds have frayed and increasingly have become
supplanted by appeals to issue preferences, summed into the attitudes of
partisanship and ideology. As the capacity for ideological thinking among the
mass public has increased, to their credit Republicans have with greater and
greater success have sought to induce the public to think about elections in more
issue-based, less personality-based terms. This unmasks the internal
contradiction created when liberal politicians try to obscure the content of
their policies to the conservative majority, and creates escalating rejection
of those politicians.

Louisiana came later to this transformation because of the populist
stain, and part of the reason the transformation has started and is picking up
speed is that some conservatives – think state Treasurer John
Kennedy and the actions
of the so-called “fiscal hawks” in the Legislature, for example – have
fused populism to conservatism. This is what confuses the left, because in its
mythology that justifies its brand of populism the redistributive foil is some
mysterious, conspiratorial cabal made up of bogeymen such as business, the
upper class, white racists, chauvinist men, Christians, etc. Instead, populists
of the right identify as the problem big government designed to enrich certain
client groups who then symbiotically support the leftists who enabled the
transfers to these special interests. And increasingly it is populists of the
right that are winning that battle of ideas.

However, the greater focus on ideas having consequences from the more
distant, in terms of state political culture, principled conservatism also is
proving more and more successful in winning elections. The outcome of the 2014
Senate contest should display a classic competition between the old, obscurant
populist strategy that Landrieu will try yet again and a campaign by Rep. Bill Cassidy that
stresses ideology and where Landrieu is deviant from the state’s majority on
major issues. A victory by him will ratify the sufficiency of the
transformation of the state’s political culture.

So it’s no surprise that Landrieu
refuses to admit the obvious, maintaining that Louisiana is a “purple
state.” Perhaps in reference to her, the last remaining Democrat elected to a
statewide office, until now it has been, but only because she has been able to
this point to muddy the palette by injecting blue. But the volume of that color
has diminished precisely because Republicans like Cassidy have more
aggressively appealed to issue preferences in campaigning and splashed more red
onto the canvas. And no doubt he will highlight generally her very liberal record
(American Conservative Union lifetime voting score through 2012
of 20.53, where a score of 0 is a perfectly liberal record) and specific
liberal votes.

Thus, when challenged on this such as hers being the decisive vote for
passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), she
tries to switch the narrative to how well she has brought home the bacon. This
might appeal to crony capitalists among Republicans, but they are being
increasingly marginalized as the broader electorate is being encouraged to
think – also aided by the visibility of relentlessly left-wing national
Democrats who have captured that level of their party – less about direct
transfers of wealth to it and more about the consequences of those transfers
taking more of its material resources and freedoms. That is territory she
desperately wishes to avoid, for she becomes defenseless at that point.

At least she appears more perceptive than state Rep. Sam Jones, who
chalks up the switching to political opportunism. That might be a reason – but if
so it is a symptom of the larger disease about which Jones appears oblivious.
He seems not to have considered why a
party switch away from Democrats is necessary for the presumably politically
ambitious – because a current incumbent/future candidate for higher office
having a Republican label who can credibly demonstrate voting more often
conservatively removes from the candidacy the toxicity of a Democrat label
caused by the increasing unpopularity of liberalism in Louisiana.

Nor does he seem to understand the dynamics of the transformation. When
he claims that the state is a third of the state electorate is locked into
Republican support, a third into Democrats, and a third up for grabs with this
portion that can swing dependent on issues and candidates, he fails to realize
that third increasingly responds more to issues than personalities. Further,
he’s whistling into the wind if he believes, in his assertion that Democrats
have a chance to win them over, voters will respond more to Republican Gov. Bobby
Jindal’s line
item vetoes of increased money available for more waiver slots to serve the
developmentally disabled, when ordered by the Legislature to make cuts for
health care spending and that program
reform will provide more services without extra expense, than they will to
being reminded that legislative Democrats
more than once tried to expand more of Obamacare onto the state (the
follies of which will have been further magnified by 2015) and attempted
to raise taxes in the 2013 session.

It seems then that Louisiana Democrats suffer from two different delusions
– on the pragmatic side that populism is not weakening as part of the state’s
political fabric nor is it being remade into a form of conservatism, and on the
ideological side that the issues can be made to work in their favor despite every
indication that they can’t (and among the most ideological and ignorant of them, their
organizational leader, that opposition
to their agenda is based on irrational considerations). None of their more visible
figures at least publicly will admit the obvious – that the party must move
away from its full-throated liberalism in order to become more than an
inconvenience to a conservative agenda in the state.

That’s why elected officials who realize this are bailing out of it, because
they don’t see any kind of change of that nature coming from Beltway Democrats
or from the Louisiana variety. Ironically, this ideologically purifies the
party even more, making it all the less likely it can adapt to a state that has
outgrown it in its current form.

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